A giant reputation drama has been unfolding in the past days: Ocean Marketing’s Paul Cristoforo has made a complete ass of himself and his company.
A nice compilation is provided by Doug Collins on his blog, and it’s aptly called How to Commit Career Suicide

The (apparently almost) entire email thread can be found on Penny Arcade’s website right here. It’s long, and unbelievably persistent in its bad form

Especially given the time of year and the usual predictions, I find this a splendid example of the fact that email isn’t dead yet, and that you really don’t need a social media policy
You just need to be polite period.
I’ve never been fond of all the segmentation that has been brought along by social media lovers fanatics. It’s an annoying splendor display of inside-out thinking that I’ve seen so many times before in IT and IRL, and so inherent to people that haven’t been around much

Apparently, you need a:

social media policy

social media strategy

social business portfolio

social business manifesto

social business code of ethics

No you don’t. All this is just money thrown away. What you need is common sense and reuse what you’ve been successfully using so far. You didn’t have these for telex, fax, or email: all technologies that enabled your employees to contact the outside world “under your company cloak”.
So maybe it was due to lack of an email strategy, policy and code of ethics that this so very rude and long email thread came into existence?
No

So what has changed then? Simple – people have become much ruder, and less afraid to vent that. Especially with working from home, the boundaries get diffuse: dressed in a suit or uniform and being at a different location around your colleagues and customers usually flips a few checkbits.
So when you e.g. got up late, say 8:30, and are sitting in your pyamas sipping on your first coffee, skipping through your emails, it might not really feel like you’re 100% representing your company – but you are

But that doesn’t mean that this is caused by the new way of working. Authority has slowly eroded over the last few decades, which is good because people have learned to think and act for themselves, slowly relearning to take responsibility for their actions, and bad because not everyone has learned to cope equally well with the new duties

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Founder of We Wire People, Martijn has 15 years experience in the field of Integration, as an Architect working in and for Enterprises. He mainly advises in case of mergers, application rationalization and Cloud / Social Media back-office integration
Martijn blogs at martijnlinssen.com